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Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!
When Windows didn't have a driver for some hardware, it would tell you it's "using 16-bit driver" (or was it DOS driver?). So it's all 32-bit.
Hah, this reminds me of Win32s on Windows 3.1x...
But if you had a system that met the minimum stated requirements, the experience was still pretty terrible.
The minimum most of us recommended at the time for acceptable performance was a 486 faster than 33 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of disk space. And some will take issue with that today, because the experience on a machine like that still wasn’t very good. You had to draw the line somewhere, and then, as now, different people had different definitions of words like “minimum” and “acceptable.”
You really needed a Pentium-class machine to be happy with Win95, and I think Win95 did a lot to goose Pentium sales for Intel. If you could afford a 100 or 120 MHz Pentium with 16 or 32 MB of RAM and at least a 540 megabyte hard drive, you were much happier with it."
I had a Pentium 100MHz, and 8MB was acceptable, although I had a friend with 16MB and a 166MHz, and the grass always seemed greener. He was able to play Tomb Raider.
I make a lot of retro videos and tested a 386 on 4MB of RAM here: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#9-26-24-wi...
https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/z486/ https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about One can make Windows 95 solar powered again. The first time was at ISSCC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juy8xP-hUtA
The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.
The clerk might've been afraid showing it would put people off.
My 486 only had 4MB of RAM and I couldn't afford the $400-$500 to take it to 16GB so I actually switched to Linux in August of 95, amusingly enough.
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
I was soooo excited when my family bought a PC with 95 on it. My best friend, who had Windows 3.1, was so jealous.
At the same time Linux was really getting off the ground (RedHat released about then) and if your hardware supported it it felt rock solid. The multi user experience was amazing and it made you feel like a wizard.
I got to play with Qnx's bootable disk at about that time too. It came with a beautiful manual explaining the architecture.
There was Windows NT and OS2/Warp too.
I didn't play a lot with the BSD variants.
It was truly a magical time for OS enthusiasts.
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
The article left out the triumphant arrival of long filenames.
That summer also marked the end of all my attempts to get friends and coworkers to switch to OS/2... although my linux experiments were ramping up at about the same time. Heady days!
I lived on the Eastside at the time, and I remember it being all over the news that Bill and Steve were running all over town in someone's 911 (I forget whether it was Bill or Steve's), blasting "start me up" and going to a bunch of launch parties at software stores.
90s Apple snark alongside full page ads in the press with lines like "Introducing Windows 95. It lets you use more than eight characters to name your files." "It has a trash can you can open and take things out of again." "It lets you drop files anywhere you want on the desktop." "Imagine that."
But where were they really?
Meanwhile we do remember the giant Windows 95 Start button banner on the CN Tower in Toronto. Marketing. Frenzy.
I can remember having fun editing several bytes of the GDI.EXE or USER.EXE with a hex-editor when a colleague went to bathroom. You should've seen their faces when they got back and the screen turned funny colors.
Suffice to say we all installed Windows NT Workstation when we had the chance because it was much more stable.
When Windows Vista got released I switched over to Mac.
When 95 released, smartphones weren't a thing, internet wasn't common for households, and downloading an album would take you a day if you were one of the lucky ones with an internet connection lol.
That makes me wonder what the first pirated song was that was ripped to MP3 and provided for download over the Internet...
Even today, if you look at MacOS, it's just the Windows 95 interface, with the taskbar moved to the top of the screen, open tasks kept on the bottom of the screen, and instead of a Start menu, there's Spotlight Search. Same thing, messier execution (just to be different).
That may be true, but certainly not because macOS got inspired by Windows, rather because Windows 95 was inspired by NeXTStep.
Microsoft dominated the 90s like no other.